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Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Germany's dangerous foreign minister

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel is the newly-crowned poster boy of Hamas. A picture of Gabriel was featured on Hamas’s Twitter page on December 31, accompanied by the following tweet: “German FM describes the Israeli occupation as an apartheid regime like the one was [sic] in South Africa.”
How did the foreign minister of one of Israel’s most important allies suddenly end up on the side of an Islamist terrorist organization that advocates targeting Israeli civilians and suicide bombings? Like many European progressives, Gabriel is capable of being hypercritical of his own Western culture – and of Israel – which is maliciously misrepresented in progressive circles as a colonialist power, while the many problematic aspects of non-white cultures, including radical Islam, are viewed as essentialist, racist or bigoted. For Gabriel, this might be due to feelings of guilt for his own country’s past crimes or might be an extension of his socialist ideology, which views Western, capitalist societies as inherently exploitative.

This worldview makes Gabriel and other like-minded progressives susceptible to anti-Israel propaganda. As reported by The Jerusalem Post European correspondent Benjamin Weinthal, Gabriel touted his hyper-critical attitude toward Israel during a panel discussion organized by – of all groups – the Kreuzberg Initiative Against Antisemitism.
The public event was held in Berlin in mid-December, as thousands of demonstrators – most of whom were migrants from Muslim countries – thronged the streets, burned Israeli flags and denounced US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
By the way, Gabriel is one of the architects – together with Chancellor Angela Merkel – of Germany’s self-destructive immigration policy that has resulted in the influx of more than a million immigrants from the Middle East and Africa since 2015. According to a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, many of these migrants bring with them anti-Jewish and anti-Israel prejudices.